Greece is one of the main entry gates into Europe.
We don't even have basic needs,
sometimes we stay all day without eating food.
You see, I sleep in the park.
They seek safety in Europe, but Greece is not safe.
You come to Greece? You will know Greece...
No work, no papers, the police, it's a problem...
I see frightened people, a lot of frightened people.
Sometimes, if you go outside, they try to beat us.
There is a very worrying increase in racist violence
and we hear about attacks almost daily.
Directly on their hearts. Knives on their hearts.
I like Greece, but Greeks don't like foreigners.
Greeks don't like foreigners, especially black people,
they hate foreigners.
Most refugees arrive in Europe by foot or by boat,
landing in Greece, Italy and Spain.
Under EU regulations, asylum claims have to be made
in the country through which refugees first enter Europe.
They cannot move to another European country.
In 2011 the European Court of Human Rights
found that asylum seekers in Greece
are at risk of inhuman and degrading treatment.
First of all it was done for the deficiencies in the asylum procedure,
the detention conditions and living conditions in Greece.
Not even the police or the state
give us an exact number of refugees.
It's complicated. We don't know the number exactly.
In 2010 it was estimated by Frontex that about 80%
of all those who entered the European Union
entered through Greece.
So all those people had nowhere to stay, no social welfare,
and many of them were just sleeping rough.
And they were trapped in Greece,
with no possibility to leave and no possibility to stay.
We ask for help from the European Union.
Things are not going well.
Some sleep in the streets and eat from the trash.
We are not eating good food.
We're going to school hungry.
16 year- old Barry lives in a hostel for child refugees,
some as young as eight.
These images of the conditions inside
were filmed by one of the residents.
You can see the toilet the way it is.
17 year-old Yaseen is a resident in the same hostel.
I have big problem.
Don't have work,
don't have money, don't have clothes,
don't have shoes.
A few months later Yaseen receives bad news
about his family back in Pakistan.
Last month they bombed our home,
I lost my family.
The same summer, Yaseen turns 18
and is made to leave the hostel.
Since then he has been on the streets.
Early in the morning
Athens parks are full of refugees sleeping rough.
When they are picked up by the police after crossing the border,
they are initially detained,
and then left to fend for themselves.
Police tell me: Go outside.
You see, I sleep in the park.
They tell me: Go, ok, go!
I have nowhere to go, I don't know nobody.
I sleep in the park.
Sometimes you pick something from refuse bin to eat.
No house, nothing, nothing I can do...
Really, here in Greece we suffer a lot.
We suffer.
We suffer a lot.
It is even difficult to eat, pay for water, food...
It's hard, it's hard for us.
People have to help refugees in this country.
They don't have arrangements for refugees.
We leave our countries because of problems
we don't leave our countries as we like.
Nobody likes to leave his country, for his heart.
We leave because of the problems.
They give me a gun, you know, AK-47,
they say 'You have to fight'.
Nurdin did not want to fight.
His mother sent him out of the country so he would be safe.
From Syria he walked for weeks,
travelling through Turkey on foot to get to Europe.
I'm staying in Axernon, just down the street,
I'm staying with my friends.
Axernon is a neighbourhood in Athens
with a large Somali community.
Welcome to Somalia! No Greek, Somalia!
This is the place, this is the house I live in.
We sleep here, you see.
This is mine, I sleep here.
There's another 7 guys who sleep here.
Not everybody has one,
we share, you know, we share the mattresses.
- Yeah, ten people. - Ten people in this room?
18 people share this tiny one bedroom flat.
We really need help from the other European countries.
We really want to get out of this country.
We really have problems here.
I have a problem with this eye as you can see.
I tried to go to the hospital three times.
But they didn't help me nothing.
Nurdin managed to get a referral
and prescription for his eye condition
after visiting the free clinic run by Doctors of the World.
We started off by only taking care
of migrant and refugee patients.
It's only for the past six months,
since the economic crisis started,
that we see a lot of Greek patients as well.
At least for the past year, we have a humanitarian crisis
because of the economic crisis.
There is no money.
Yeah, I understand the economy is bad.
You people should allow us to leave!
It's much too hard.
I'm looking for a way to get out of Greece.
To any other European country...
We see even asylum seekers now
that they want to go back to their countries because
they have no jobs, they cannot survive in Greece.
Maybe I'll go back to my country,
because here it's not good for me.
My country is better.
Mahmud has spent time in an Iranian prison.
Here is a situation where you feel that
there is dire need for European solidarity.
Active solidarity.
Because usually immigrants come here,
and they don't have legal papers,
because they want to go to other European countries.
If you want to go to other countries, France, Norway,
airport: problem.
When we end up in a very poor country,
you people should allow us to go!
Why?
At the airport: Get out! Get out!
Always, why?
The other member states want Greece to control the borders
so that the people don't go irregularly there.
We are trapped here like in a prison, it's a prison.
I went to the airport, I told them: In this paper
they write I have to leave the country within 30 days.
So I'm leaving, I'm going to another country.
I was arrested, three days in jail...
We come here to get papers, but they don't give us any.
It's a problem.
There are many people and many asylum seekers
who do not manage to apply for asylum
and may be in the streets of Athens undocumented.
You see thousands of people without papers here.
The police station in Athens where most refugees
make their initial asylum claim is Petrou Ralli.
Applications can be made once a week.
I'm coming here for two months, every week I'm here.
And how long have you been here?
Six months.
For two years. Every week I come here.
No give papers.
Some people have been here for three years, ten years.
They don't give them papers.
We sleep here, Thursday, Friday, Saturday,
day and night.
In the sun, in the cold.
No house, nowhere to sleep, no water, no food, no toilets.
Not only do asylum seekers queue day and night,
sometimes waiting for months or even years
to start their application.
They also say the police forcibly disperse them,
preventing them from registering their asylum claims.
Before you people came, they were pushing us.
Like in the slave trade.
The police come and chase us away
We return and they chase us off again.
Police, they beat, beat, beat.
They beat people.
They say we should go.
You people stay here for quite long,
so that they cannot pursue us again.
An interpreter was willing to speak
about her experiences working at this police station,
on condition of anonymity
Her words are spoken by an actress.
I think one of the main problems with Petrou Ralli is the back gate.
In theory your interview should take place
from 3 up to 6 months after you applied for asylum.
In most of the cases it's not like that.
It could be like 2 years before you have your first interview.
So they have to come and renew their pink cards
every 3 to 6 months.
So they come at 6 o'clock in the morning
they wait outside behind the grills.
If it's raining, if it's snowing, if it's 40 degrees,
they have to wait there.
So at 2:30 or 3 a cop or two come back and
they call names without keeping any confidentiality at all.
So, they are given their pink cards,
but sometimes they also give rejections or positives.
Mostly rejections,
because I've never heard of any positive decision actually.
So, they call names,
They will bring in and out about 10 or 20 people.
The point is, they will not translate the whole decision.
They will just tell them:
'You leave the country'
'You, fuck off'
or: 'You're done with asylum'
or: 'You didn't convince anyone with your lies.'
In these situations, extremist groups take advantage.
They find fertile ground to take advantage.
The racist people, their community, it's called racist people,
they don't like black people.
They broke the windows, you see.
They were throwing stones at the house
and we were sleeping inside.
They were staying here like ten minutes,
and with the police also here.
They don't do nothing you see.
They were more than fifty people, shouting...
'Go, go back to your country black people.'
They stabbed one boy from here to here.
The boy wanted to die.
When I saw the boy yesterday, the boy started to tell me
that Golden Dawn wanted to kill him.
Because they don't want foreigners.
They call themselves nazi, nazi group.
Chrysi Avgi, or Golden Dawn is an extreme right party.
In the 2012 elections, they won 18 out of 300 seats
in the Greek parliament with 7 % of the vote.
Mobile phone footage published online
shows Golden Dawn supporters singing their anthem
and giving nazi salutes.
A neo-nazi party, a nazi sympathising party
in a territory, in a part of the world
where the nazis caused huge pain only a few decades ago,
it doesn't logically make any sense, it can't really exist.
According to the records of the Hellenic Statistical Authority
when the Second World War began
The Greek population was 7,344,000.
By the time the War ended our population was 6,805,000.
Manolis Glezos, who is a Syriza MP, has a seat in parliament
he, with his friend in 1941, climbed onto the Acropolis
and pulled down the swastika and put up the Greek flag.
And he has to sit in the parliament with neo-nazis!
It's an extraordinary situation.
Golden Dawn is an originally fascist organisation
It has connections with all the fascist parties all over Europe
and the whole world, even the Ku Klux Klan.
Opinion polls at the end of 2012 show growing support
for Golden Dawn, placing them third.
The following mobile phone clip was filmed at a
Golden Dawn meeting in Perama, on the outskirts of Athens.
We received complaints concerning local problems
in Keratsini due to Egyptians.
But we say that from now on they will give account for
their actions to Golden Dawn and to the Greek citizens.
The day after that meeting, Egyptians are gathered
in Perama at the home of some fishermen.
Egyptians never had bad relations with the Greeks,
in fact, quite the opposite.
But recently the far right party Golden Dawn has been
on the rise, with its aggression towards foreigners.
This is the car we use for work.
My family and I were sleeping in the house,
at around 3:10 am we heard our
doors and windows being broken.
I opened the window and saw more than 10-15 people
with Golden Dawn written on their t-shirts.
Each one of them had at least one of these metal batons.
They forgot this.
If you hit someone over the head with this, you could kill them.
And we don't know why they are doing this to us Egyptians.
I have been here for 20 years, I pay my taxes.
They came from there,
from that street.
They came down and saw that
one of the Egyptian fishermen was sleeping here.
This is his blood.
And then we heard the man shout 'Come! Help me, help me!'
We went upstairs onto the roof,
up there,
and we couldn't see his face,
so much blood that we couldn't see his face.
This is inhuman of them
when will this end?
This is very sad, unbelievable,
about 7-800 attacks, and many, many attacks to kill people.
And there is a kind of pattern in these attacks:
many people going together,
attacking one migrant
using dogs to intimidate them...
They start telling the dog to chase us:
'Take him! Take him!'
And they were laughing, they were happy.
They go to the areas where the immigrants live
and they wait for them especially late at night
and then 3 or 4 or 5 of them attack one.
They were many, they grabbed me
started beating me.
So, in a sense, it's not random
I think it must be organised in that sense.
Some days were very heavy for us,
in one day, about 31 people were in hospital.
They are injured with broken legs and hands and open heads.
I have seen personally people who have been
beaten in the face, in the head.
And they were afraid to come immediately,
they were beaten on a Saturday,
and they would come midweek, the next week.
Because they were afraid to circulate in the town.
'Hey mavros!' that's: 'Hey black, hey black!'
How do I know that it is the Golden Dawn?
I just ask them: Who hit you? And they say:
White people, wearing black clothes with the signs.
The people who chase immigrants
when they see them on the road,
they always have something, a sign, of Golden Dawn.
And if you hear their spots on TV,
they threaten Greek people who might be helping
in any way, even speaking with an immigrant,
they threaten them as well.
Our dead brother's name was Shehzad Luqman.
He had been living in Peristeri for the last four years.
He was going to his job on his bike.
And they were waiting there and when he got there
they pulled out their knives, their weapons,
and they killed our brother.
Perpetrators of racist attacks are rarely apprehended
however on this occasion it was different.
A taxi driver saw the whole thing
and he called the police.
Every minute he called them:
They're now here, they're now turning...
From the spot of the murder to Syntagma.
For 35 or 40 minutes he was following them.
At last at Syntagma, they were arrested.
And there was the knife, with blood, they found it on them.
In the home of one of the suspects the police also found
a selection of weapons and Golden Dawn literature.
And now the police does not accept that it was an attack
with racist and nationalist motivation.
The law never arrested them.
It was the effort of the taxi driver.
A very brave man, and I salute this person.
Every day in broad daylight there are attacks,
on buses or in the streets,
where Greek citizens intervene and call the police,
when there's an attack on an immigrant.
And police have shown up and have arrested the immigrants
and sometimes they even harass and arrest the Greek people.
Everywhere where an attack is happening, there is always
a car, or a cycle, or a policeman walking,
like they didn't see anything.
One attack, even the police was near there,
they did nothing, they were talking...
They acted like they didn't see me.
I have a friend, a black one, who works with me,
and suddenly a car stopped
and four people came out of the car, they attacked him.
And the police was there, he was calling the police,
and they were looking, they didn't move.
And they let the car go.
They said: 'Oh, we cannot do anything for you.'
There is no accountability from the police.
And there is no accountability from the Greek state.
From the police, from the government
they have an open permit.
What you have here is a state that has a
clear continuity with a totalitarian regime.
We have to remember that Greece had a dictatorship,
that ended in 1974 officially, but there was a transition
and not a rupture into the post-dictatorial state,
into the democratic state.
When the junta fell in 1974
the police force was never really cleaned up
and so the police force in Greece doesn't really operate
to serve and protect the people
the way it should in a democratic society.
I've been beaten by fascists several times.
I've been beaten by police more times than beaten by fascists,
since 1973 and the revolt against the dictatorship.
It was about 11 o'clock in the morning
and we heard some voices outside
and we found out that there was
one policeman in plain clothes and one in uniform
beating an immigrant.
We started shouting from the windows,
things like: 'Stop these racist attacks!'
In a second, there were about 30 policemen,
25-30 policemen, riot police,
coming from the one side of the road
and about 15 other people from the other side of the road.
Later we discovered that they were members of Golden Dawn.
They took the immigrant away.
And they all gathered outside the front door of our offices,
started shouting at us.
In the beginning saying that 'You have to come down'
and 'You give protection to illegal immigrants and we're going to arrest you'
and the other ones shouting: 'We won't just arrest you'
'We will' ok 'fuck you!'
Some of them were saying: 'We will turn you into soap'
the fascist, nazi slogan.
It was a terrifying thing.
Not just because there were the fascists there,
but because together with the fascists were policemen
in uniforms, officially showing that they were policemen
being in a kind of delirium,
crazy, beating, shouting, swearing...
The police, they ask me: 'Where is your paper?'
When I give them my papers they ask me:
'Is this the paper?' - they cut it.
And they put it like this and say: 'This is not a paper'
I said: 'You are the ones who gave me that paper!'
They attack me, the police.
And then they remove my shirt, I'm there with no shirt on.
They look at me and say: 'Take him to the police'
'He doesn't have papers.'
They take me to the police, although I have papers.
After nine hours they let me go.
We have also testimonies by people
who have been attacked by the police.
The police beat you like animals, they beat you like animals.
We have people who come
who have been hit by clubs by the police.
Omonia is an Athens neighbourhood
with a large migrant community.
I was walking through Omonia
and I heard a lot of screaming and shouting
and I saw an immigrant being arrested by two policemen
with their scarves over their face.
And he fell to the ground and they picked him up by his legs,
he was in handcuffs,
and they started dragging him along the ground.
And I took my mobile phone out and started filming.
At which point they turned their attention on me
and surrounded me
and an argument followed demanding my phone.
And I was arrested and taken to the police station for the day.
Police have a permanent presence, checking papers and arresting people.
At a street corner in Omonia police are detaining
foreigners suspected of being in the country illegally.
The detainees wave at the camera, motioning to get closer.
You take photo?
We are press.
But the police object to the recording of their actions.
Yeah, but you take photo?
You can't take photo, you know.
Close the camera please.
The police have no right to prevent you from filming
or taking pictures in public spaces.
We're being stopped.
Are you journalists?
Yes, we are journalists, we're from London.
It is illegal recording police.
Policemen have no right to request any photographic
data from your memory card or video camera.
It's explicitly prohibited.
If you take video, delete the video.
They have no right at all to touch your stills or video camera.
Get your hand off my camera!
Get your camera down.
I'm allowed to film.
Get your hand off my camera!
And there's been a very serious development a few months ago
when a group of demonstrators including women
were arrested and held in detention and tortured.
They went on motorbikes through some of the areas in Athens
that have high immigrant populations,
where Golden Dawn have been literally terrorising people
to show that we Greek citizens or Greek people
are in solidarity with immigrants and we don't accept
that our neighbourhoods are being taken over and dominated by neo-nazis.
They were hitting them, they were slapping them, they were spitting at them,
they were using them as ashtrays.
When I went there and saw them I was shocked
by what I saw, by the beatings.
These heavy bruises are not inflicted by one hit.
These are repeated hits with different instruments and means
in the same body parts.
That can only happen if you intend to ...
... to inflict severe pain on someone,
if you want to torture them.
What we heard from the 15 arrested people is that
the policemen who were doing all these things to them
openly claimed that they are members of the Golden Dawn.
What was transferred to me was that
the most terrifying thing was that other policemen
were filming on their cell phones, their mobile phones,
saying that they will use these videos and photographs
to give them to Golden Dawn.
The official line of the police is that nothing like that happened.
And what has happened now in my reading is that
the Golden Dawn has come in as a kind of a backup,
one of the last few backups the state has,
to impose fear on its citizens, on its subjects
and to continue existing and ruling as before.
Fear is not an option.
The people must understand that, we must not fear them.
If we let them scare us and terrorise us, then they win.
This must not happen.
People should fight back, people should resist.
The people have the power to do so.
In June 2012 97 year-old Katina Sifakaki
leads a march against Golden Dawn through Athens.
She has fought fascism once before, during the Second World War,
when she was part of the Greek resistance.
The people were united, they put aside every difference they had between them.
In April 2012 a few hundred people joined a protest against Golden Dawn.
Since then thousands have taken to the streets
to protest against racist attacks,
in solidarity with refugees and migrants.
These groups, antifascists, the left wing
are hope for the immigrants.
There's been a very very strong and diverse response
which you don't see reported in the international media
on the really local level,
in neighbourhoods and squares all over Greece.
We're going to come together and protest
against these deranged murderous fascists.
We are not afraid of them.
Greek society is a freedom-loving, democratic
and spontaneous society.
There's no money left to run even the most basic of services.
You don't have any money to run hospitals properly,
or kindergartens or anything.
Even the most primary, the most basic infrastructures
for peoples' everyday lives are not there anymore.
Greek doctors have been instructed in a directive
to not treat undocumented migrants.
I used to work in a hospital about a year ago
and we had that instruction but we never followed it.
Because as doctors we have sworn to help people.
We use a mobile clinic.
And they were treating people near a Golden Dawn office.
And they were out on the balcony and showing like:
'We will get you' to us, who are doctors!
In a lot of the international media the Golden Dawn
is portrayed as somewhat anti-systemic, maybe,
as a party trying to create some sort of rupture,
some sort of radical change,
while essentially they are the continuation
of mainstream politics by other means.
Before the last elections, you saw speeches for instance by Samaras
even going as far as saying: 'We need to clean Greece of immigrants'
The kind of terms that sort of point to ethnic cleansing
which is exactly the sort of language that Golden Dawn use.
When Samaras was saying for example:
'We have to clean the streets from immigrants'
Golden Dawn was getting out and started hitting immigrants in the streets.
The prime minister's choice of words 'to clean the streets'
draws a direct parallel between migrants and dirt or litter.
Speaking of migrants in terms of disease,
natural disaster or infestation,
bears the implicit message that they are a threat to society.
People are moving, they're desperate
because of violations of human rights,
because of poverty, because of climate change,
for all these reasons, people are moving.
I get into the country and they give me a paper:
In thirty days you should leave the country.
I don't know where to go now, after thirty days,
I should leave the country, go back to Somalia...
We've had like 10 people coming from
Iran, Afghanistan or Iraq in 2000.
And now we have thousands of them.
It's not something that happened by accident.
We didn't leave them any choice back in their countries, so they came here.
Most of them did not really want to come to Greece.
I really want to be in any country better than this.
We are not animals, we are human beings.
We can walk, we can eat, we can talk.
So please, I'm begging the two of you now,
anybody who will see us on here, tell them
we ask them that they should allow us to go, please!